Elliot Harmon

Elliot Harmon

Activism Director

Elliot is the activism director at EFF. He advocates for free speech and the right to innovate online, with particular emphases on patents, copyright, open access, and Section 230.

Before coming to EFF, Elliot served as director of communications at Creative Commons, an organization that helps creators share their works with the public via open copyright licenses. Before that, he worked as a writer and curator for TechSoup, a technology resource for the nonprofit community. He has degrees from the University of South Dakota and the California College of the Arts.

Deeplinks Posts by Elliot

Anuwave’s Suit Against Coinbase Demonstrates a Longstanding Flaw in the Patent System This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month deals with SMS (short messaging service), a technology that goes back to the mid-1980s. Modern-day SMS messages, typically bundled with mobile phone services, have been around since 1992, but...

The Senate Judiciary Committee recently held a hearing on “Protecting Digital Innocence.” The hearing covered a range of problems facing young people on the Internet today, with a focus on harmful content and privacy-invasive data practices by tech companies. While children do face problems online, some committee members seemed...

Despite its name, Sen. Josh Hawley’s Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act (PDF) would make the Internet less safe for free expression, not more. It would violate the First Amendment by allowing a government agency to strip platforms of legal protection based on their decisions to host or remove...

Over nearly two decades, the NSA has searched millions of Americans’ telephone call records—all without a warrant or, for the vast majority of these calls, any suspicion of wrongdoing. It’s time to end the mass telephone Call Detail Records (CDR) program once and for all. Please join us in ...

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee held a hearing this week to discuss the spread of white nationalism, online and offline. The hearing tackled hard questions about how online platforms respond to extremism online and what role, if any, lawmakers should play. The desire for more aggressive moderation policies in...

Do you want to help defend civil liberties around the world? Are you an expert in copyright, intermediary liability, and European lawmaking? A rare opportunity to help guide EFF in those arenas is now available—we're hiring an International Policy Director. EFF weighs in when international lawmaking has a huge...

In April 2018, House Republicans held a hearing on the “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms” that focused on misguided claims that Internet platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook actively discriminate against conservative political viewpoints. Now, a year later, Senator Ted Cruz is poised to take the Senate...

Congress took a big step today toward protecting net neutrality, competition, and privacy for Internet users. The House Energy and Commerce Committee just voted 30-22 to approve an amended version of the Save the Internet Act of 2019 (H.R.1644). Please join us in urging your members of Congress...

EFF is deeply saddened and disturbed by the massacre in New Zealand. We offer our condolences to the survivors and families of victims.This horrific event had an online component; one gunman livestreamed the event, and it appears that he had an active and hateful online presence. Enforcing their terms of...

Three years ago, we warned of a string of dangerous new policy proposals on the horizon. Under these proposals, platforms would be forced to implement copyright bots that sniffed all of the media that users uploaded to them, deleting your uploads with no human review. It’s happening. The European...